I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but fishy recent events raise serious questions about the way health organizations, corporations, and the legacy media have handled the COVID-19 pandemic. When Donald Trump was president, news outlets breathlessly repeated high — and almost certainly inflated — numbers of COVID-19 “cases” and deaths. The New York Times even put a list of names on its cover. Yet now that Joe Biden has entered the Oval Office, things are changing.
Shortly after Biden took office, the World Health Organization (WHO) altered its guidelines on COVID-19 testing, rightly noting that tests with a high cycle threshold (Ct) should not be considered “positive,” since a high Ct means the virus is no longer active. In other words, previous practices resulted in a high number of false positives.
This wasn’t exactly a secret. As PJ Media’s Stacey Lennox pointed out, The New York Times reported last August that as many as 90 percent of COVID-19 tests in three states did not indicate active illness. In September 2020, a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases concluded that only COVID-19 tests with a Ct of 30 or lower should be considered active cases, even though the CDC instructions for PCR testing from December 1, 2020, still uses a 40 Ct benchmark.
The WHO’s new guidelines make good sense, but the timing is rather curious. It almost seems as though the WHO wants to make it seem like COVID-19 disappeared overnight when Joe Biden became president.
Also curious: CNN appears to have retired its banner showing COVID-19 cases and deaths.
Here's a quick snapshot pic.twitter.com/ZuEKhG4C3O
— Caleb Hull (I'm With the CCP Don't Ban Me) (@CalebJHull) January 21, 2021
On Thursday, the second day of the Biden administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the seven-day average of COVID-19 cases suggests the disease “might actually be plateauing in the sense of turning around.”
On Wednesday, when Biden became president, Amazon CEO Dave Clark wrote a letter to Biden, offering to use Amazon’s warehouses to distribute COVID-19 vaccines. Trump’s administration had partnered with pharmaceutical companies to create the vaccines in record time, but Amazon never reached out to Trump offering to help him distribute the vaccines.
COVID-19 doesn’t care whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden occupies the Oval Office, but it seems so many institutions do. If the WHO guidelines result in decreased numbers of reported cases, if Fauci convinces America that the virus has plateaued, if CNN puts the virus more out of mind, and if Amazon turns around the vaccine distribution problems, these various actors could make it seem like Joe Biden magically solved the pandemic.
The true threat of COVID-19 had always been its mystery. People can spread the virus before developing symptoms. Some cases can be extremely serious, requiring the use of respirators. A Secret Service agent lost his big toe and his foot because too much blood left his extremities while he battled the virus. Some people have lost their sense of smell and taste — bizarre.
It did not help that China lied about the virus, hoarded the world’s personal protective equipment (PPE), and then sent people across the world in an apparent attempt to infect other countries. China’s decision to hide information about the virus helped stoke a global panic.
None of this means COVID-19 is not real. I myself contracted the disease and spread the virus to my wife and likely to my daughter before the first symptoms appeared. Since I am young and relatively healthy, those symptoms were minor. I had the flu one year before COVID-19, and the flu knocked me on my butt for days, while I could function much better with COVID-19. Even my wife’s 95-year-old grandmother had mild symptoms and died of old age after she had recovered from COVID-19.
COVID-19 is a serious disease, and measures like social distancing and face masks to mitigate the spread, somewhat. But the combination of China’s lies, the mystery, and the legacy media’s hype have turned COVID-19 into a world-stopping pandemic when it did not need to be one. COVID-19 is worst for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. If we protect them, we need not shut down the economy or keep kids away from school. Lockdowns have serious long-term consequences that far outweigh the potential benefits, and COVID-19 spreads fastest among people who live in close-quarters, anyway.
If America can handle COVID-19 with sanity, the nation will cool its jets. Unfortunately, it seems some in the medical establishment, the legacy media, and corporate America are only willing to admit the truth about the virus with Trump out of office.
That suggests something many conservatives have long suspected — that some of the institutions we trust skewed COVID-19 to make Trump look worse than he was, and are now changing their policies in order to make Biden look better than he is.
That’s despicable, and Americans should call them out on it.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
